The widespread use of the Internet has led to the establishment of search engine environments as the virtually standard way in which users interface to the World Wide Web and retrieve content and access web and other network sites. Search engines such as Google™, Yahoo™, allow users to enter a term or phrase of interest (a “search term”), and then return the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) addresses of web sites that pertain to the or other information regarding the search term. Search engine functionality is also incorporated in many applications that serve as portals or interfaces to the Internet in general, or specific web sites for organizations or individuals.
As the numbers of Internet users and information providers increase, search engines sites have become increasingly specialized to provide greater focus and comprehensive search capability on specific subjects. Instead of general search engines that provide general search capability for virtually all possible topics, specialized search engines have been developed for specific fields and topics of interest. For example, music or movie sites allow users to download entertainment content, social networking sites allow users to share personal information or search for dates, job sites allow users to look for jobs, retail or auction sites allow users to search for products, and so on.
Despite the increasing specialization of web sites and general content on the Internet, search engine methodology remains relatively rudimentary. In general, present methods of finding and retrieving data for search engine users attempt to match the entire query string or a portion of the query string to a list of terms in the database, and choose content that is associated with a matched term. Such methods typically only perform a simple keyword matching operation to find content based on the query string. In many cases, there are no matches found between the entire query string and the list of terms. In other cases, the returned content does not fit the actual search query as optimally as possible due to the use of simplistic keyword matching algorithms.
Present methods of finding content through search engine activity typically do not utilize the search results themselves. They are limited to using the input queries only, and therefore do not take advantage of much of the relevant information that may be available to tailor a message search. Present search techniques also do not exploit general subject matter indicators that may be present in a query or set of search results. As a result, they are unable to expand the scope of searched documents to include relevant documents that may not actually create a keyword hit.